Publisher's Synopsis
"CERTAIN AND IMPOSSIBLE EVENTS begins in April 1994, with the suicide of a fourteen-year-old boy in a small New England town. The boy left behind no trail of warning signs and no suicide note, only a series of rumors that connected his actions to the suicide of Kurt Cobain, whose death had become international front-page news a week earlier. Drawn to the hazy circumstances of her classmate's death, author Candace Jane Opper embarks on an unsentimental investigation into the personal and cultural echo an individual suicide can produce. Fusing memoir with history and science, she gradually reveals the shape of suicide as it is handed down to us-from literature to YouTube, from middle school health class to sociological study, from the immutability of objects to the fluidity of oral history. In this candid epistolary essay, Opper invites readers into her decades-long obsession with a boy she barely knew, creating space for herself and her
